Principal Associate
After ten years in his initial career as a scientist, Bob qualified in information science at the College of Librarianship Wales in the mid-1970s. Following a post as Technical Librarian with a firm of consulting engineers, in the mid-1980s he became IT Manager for the NHS Training Directorate, growing the role over the ensuing eight years to become first Information Systems Manager and finally Information Manager. Bob left the NHS in 1994 to set up InfoPlex Associates, a networked knowledge and information management consultancy.
During the 1990s, he developed a methodology for Knowledge Mapping based upon action research and process modelling which has been successfully applied in a number of cases. This has recently been extended to include the mapping of knowledge, skill and experience required by individual roles. He brings a number of discrete skills to this 'Third Order' knowledge mapping, including the development of enterprise ontologies, taxonomies and thesauri, and knowledge elicitation. Lately, he has focused on the application to knowledge organization of metadata schemes, associative databases, and the new XML-based technologies such as RDF, XSLT and XTM (Topic Maps).
Bob has presented seminars regularly for a number of years, including a Knowledge Mapping seminar and workshops on Corporate Taxonomies and Knowledge Architecture. He has written a number of articles on such topics as knowledge mapping, metadata, the ecology of knowledge and the Associative Model of Data. Bob was a founding member, in 1992, of the Aslib IRM Network, an antecedent of NetIKX, the Network for Information and Knowledge Exchange and served on their management committes over a 16-year period. He is currenty Vice-Chair of ISKO UK (International Society for Knowledge Organization, UK Chapter) and a member of CILIP, the Records Management Society of Great Britain and the British Computer Society.
Bob Bater’s Specialties:
Bob is Principal Associate of InfoPlex Associates who provide advice and development services in Information and Knowledge Organization - knowledge mapping, metadata schemas, ontologies, taxonomies, thesauri, Topic Maps - across all types of organizations in both the public and private sectors. He is also Director of Development at KnowPlexity Limited, a new company established to provide high quality e-learning materials in all aspects of Knowledge Management.